The present invention relates to the field of software deployment and, more particularly, to enabling dynamic software installer requirement dependency checks.
Enterprise software solutions are usually dependent on third party components installed within an operating system to function properly. Components can often include databases, application servers, and/or operating systems. In many instances, these components and/or environments are constantly updated. These updates may occur out of cycle with updates to the enterprise software solutions. There are many execution environment configurations in which the software solution can be deployed. The large number of potential environments and continual updates of related components presents a challenge for software developers of installation tools.
To elaborate, installation tools typically perform pre-requisite checks during an install to ensure enterprise software can execute correctly. The dependency checks can be for specific versions of dependent third party components. When a pre-requisite check fails, the installer can fail to install the software. However, enterprise software requires release cycle development to update option lists and dependency checkers before a release statement about supporting the new versions can be made.
The enterprise software installer can fail for reasons ranging from component version incompatibility to component configuration incompatibility, even though the software being installed can execute correctly. To diagnose/debug installer failures, users frequently have to manually report failures to support entities. Consequently, there is little shared understanding of deployment across these groups, no shared automations, and no reuse of previous successful cycles, leading to configuration errors. This current approach is inefficient and static which results in lost productivity and decreases the quality of the user experience. It also severely hampers installation agents, who may be tasked with installation responsibilities, which these agents are unable to complete in a timely fashion. The disclosure provides these installation agents with needed and heretofore unavailable tools.